Quantitative research

CATI Telephone Surveys in India

Computer-assisted telephone interviewing from our multilingual call centre.

Quick answer

Use this method when the question calls for fast, monitored, national numbers. Market Research India runs 300–3,000 completes over 1–3 weeks, in 50 Indian cities and fourteen languages.

Proposal in 24 hours
Scoped, itemised and fixed-fee.
50 cities, 14 languages
Our own supervised field teams.
Senior-led, NDA-first
A research director on every project.

2,400+

Projects delivered

Cities with field teams

Industries covered

Indian languages

Questions this method is built to answer

Commission this when one of the questions below is holding up a decision. If your question is not on the list, say so in the brief — we would rather recommend a different method than sell you this one.

How quickly can we read a national sample before a decision deadline?
What do customers say when asked by a neutral third party rather than by us?
Can we reach this audience at all without travelling to them?
How are the numbers moving week by week while the campaign runs?
Which markets need a follow-up in person once the phone read is in?

How we run it

5 stages, with one research director accountable across all of them. The person who scopes the study is the person who presents the findings.

1
Build the sample frame
Numbers are drawn from your own database or a licensed frame, de-duplicated and stratified by state and circle before any dialling.
2
Script with the logic locked
Quotas, routing and range checks live in the script. Questions are rewritten for the ear, because a phone respondent cannot re-read a grid.
3
Pilot fifty calls
A pilot batch tests length, drop-off points and language comprehension, and the script is adjusted before the main launch.
4
Dial across day-parts
Calls are spread across mornings, evenings and weekends with up to five attempts per number, which protects the sample from a daytime bias.
5
Monitor live and report daily
Supervisors listen in while interviews run, and you see completes, quotas and refusal rates every morning rather than at the end.

At a glance

CATI Telephone Surveys — typical study parameters

Typical scale: 300 to 3,000 completes from a multilingual call centre, with 12 to 20 minute interviews
Fieldwork window: One to three weeks, with daily completes from day one
Lead time: Scripting and pilot in three days; dialling starts in the first week
Coverage: National reach from one centre, including markets where in-person fieldwork is slow or costly
Languages: Interviewers working in fourteen languages, matched to the respondent's number and state
Core methods: CATI scripting · Quota control · Call monitoring · Multilingual teams
Reporting: Daily progress reports, clean datasets and a topline within 48 hours of the last call
Best suited to: Reaching a dispersed sample quickly

What you receive

3 named deliverables, each written to be used rather than filed. Everything ships with the underlying data, so your team can keep working after the debrief.

Daily progress
A daily dashboard of completes against quota, call outcomes and refusal reasons while fieldwork is still open.
Clean datasets
Datasets delivered cleaned, labelled and de-duplicated, with the full call-outcome history attached.
Topline reports
A topline with the headline numbers inside two days of the last completed interview.

Quality control in the field

Fieldwork in India fails quietly when nobody checks it. These controls are run on every cati telephone surveys study, by a quality team that reports separately from the field team.

Silent live monitoring
Supervisors listen in on at least ten per cent of live calls, and on the full recording of any interview the system flags for pace or routing.
Logic locked into the script
Routing, quotas and range checks sit in the CATI script, so an interviewer cannot skip a filter or force a response to close a quota.
Call-back discipline
Up to five attempts across different days and day-parts before a number is retired. This is what keeps a telephone sample from becoming a daytime sample.
A number-level audit trail
Every dial, outcome and duration is logged, so contact, response and refusal rates are reported from the record rather than estimated.
Interviewer-level performance review
Completion, refusal and average-duration rates are tracked per interviewer, and anyone outside the band is re-briefed or removed from the study.

Method choice

CATI Telephone Surveys, or one of these instead?

Most briefs can be answered more than one way, and the wrong instrument is the most expensive mistake in research. Here is how cati telephone surveys compares with the two methods buyers most often weigh against it.

	CATI Telephone Surveys	Online Surveys	Quantitative Surveys
Best used for	Reaching a dispersed sample quickly	Speed, volume and anything needing visual stimulus	Producing numbers that survive scrutiny
Typical scale	300–3,000 completes	300–10,000 completes	400–5,000 completes
Fieldwork window	1–3 weeks	3 days–2 weeks	3–6 weeks
Evidence produced	Fast, monitored, national numbers	Large samples with advanced designs built in	Measured incidence with a stated margin of error
Projects to a population
Relative cost	Lower than face to face	Lowest per complete	Scales with sample and incidence

Where this method stops

Anything needing stimulus, long grids or more than twenty minutes of attention belongs in person or online.

City coverage

Where this work is strongest

We field in all 50 cities, but these are the markets where this method has the most to offer — because of the infrastructure, the respondent base or the sectors concentrated there.

Before you brief us

Frequently asked questions

How long does a cati telephone surveys project take?

One to three weeks, with daily completes from day one. Scripting and pilot in three days; dialling starts in the first week. Analysis and reporting add a further one to two weeks, so most studies close inside six to ten weeks from brief to debrief.

What sample size do you recommend?

300 to 3,000 completes from a multilingual call centre, with 12 to 20 minute interviews. The right number is set by the smallest subgroup you need to report separately, not by a round figure, and we will say when a smaller sample would answer the question just as well.

What drives the cost of cati telephone surveys in India?

Incidence and audience difficulty first, then scale, the number of cities and languages, and the depth of reporting. Relative to other methods on this site, the cost profile is: lower than face to face. Send a brief and you get a fixed-fee proposal within 24 hours.

When is cati telephone surveys the wrong choice?

Anything needing stimulus, long grids or more than twenty minutes of attention belongs in person or online.

How do you control quality in the field?

Supervisors listen in on at least ten per cent of live calls, and on the full recording of any interview the system flags for pace or routing. Beyond that, interviewer-level performance review: completion, refusal and average-duration rates are tracked per interviewer, and anyone outside the band is re-briefed or removed from the study.

Can international teams commission this from outside India?

Yes. We report in English, run calls across US, European and Asian time zones, and handle local-language fieldwork and translation end to end.

Study at a glance

Discipline: Quantitative
Typical scale: 300–3,000 completes
Field window: 1–3 weeks
Projectable: Yes
Relative cost: Lower than face to face
Cities covered: 50

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8 metros, 42 Tier 2 markets, 30 sectors and 15 guides, each applying cati telephone surveys to one specific context.

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Guides and pricing

Cost drivers, briefing checklists and buyer guides written for this method.

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Next step

Ready to scope a cati telephone surveys study?